Chapter 8
brOOKLYN
She hadn’t decided anything, which was itself a decision, and she knew it.
Three days had passed since Falkin had sat on her lab stool and told her the Intergalactic Dating Agency had a certificate with her name on it.
Brooklyn had responded by doing what she did with everything too big to put away.
She’d worked.
She’d run the manifest twice.
She’d reorganized the sample fridge alphabetically, then by collection date, and then, when neither helped, back the way it had been.
The message was still in her archive. She’d checked twice, which was one more time than she’d admit to.
Unopened. Sitting under four freight manifests and a station notice about recycling.
She hadn’t opened it then. Was that stubbornness or self-defense?
She decided it was efficiency, and went back to work.
She’d shown up to every session in the correct chair and been flawlessly professional and not looked at him once longer than the work required.
And she’d felt him not push, all day, every day, that terrible warm patience that gave her nothing to shut a door against.
Was she fine?
She’d have said so, if anyone asked.
She was very good at almost believing it.
She was heading to the admin level to sign off on the transport reservations, the paper part, the part she could do.
Outside the admin office she passed the wall display, muted, running an Earth feed somebody had left up.
A man in a good suit at a podium. The scroll under him said trade oversight committee and foreign influence and a name, HARGROVE.
Behind him, a small knot of people with signs she didn’t slow down to read.
The admin had sent a memo that morning.
Anticipate increased public scrutiny, remain on message.
Which was admin for someone Earth-side has decided we’re the problem.
Not today, Brooklyn had decided.
She kept walking. That was when she heard Re-lee’s voice through the half-open office door, bright and pink and carrying the way Re-lee’s voice always carried.
Re-lee had never in her radiant life said anything she thought needed hiding.
“—which is the most romantic part of the whole file, honestly, I nearly cried when I processed it—”
Brooklyn slowed.
She didn’t mean to.
Her feet just did it, the way her hands found faults in machines.
The old animal part of her had learned to catch a conversation about her before she walked into the middle of it.
“—because most applicants, they’re just hoping, you know?
They fill out the forms and they hope. But Guard Falkin, he came up here certain.
He told me himself, the first week—he had a wager going with another guard back home.
That he’d find a match just like his friend Karuk found, a real one, an Earth match, and win the whole—”
Brooklyn stopped walking.
Win.
Did she say ‘win’?
“—and I said, oh, that’s not very romantic, betting on love, and he laughed—” Re-lee’s voice dropped into something reverent and delighted “—and the best part, the part I’m not even supposed to know, is the other guard has to come do the process too when Falkin wins, it’s a whole—it’s binding, it’s a Vorjan House honor thing, so it’s not just one love story, it’s going to be two, all because Falkin found the exact right—”
Brooklyn walked away before she heard the rest of the sentence.
The part of her that she’d been pressing down, the tiny bit of her that hoped that maybe, just maybe, Falkin actually cared, that romantic part of her, died, right there.
She didn’t remember the lift.
She remembered standing in her quarters afterward. In the middle of the too-expensive rug, under the defiant plants, in front of the wall of photographs in their mismatched frames.
Holding nothing.
She’d come in for… what? Nothing she could name.
The grandmother’s blanket was folded over the chair where it always was. The colorful quarters that said this person is fine, this person is more than fine.
Her fingers ran over the blanket, feeling the texture of the cloth, of the weave of it.
A bet.
She made herself think it plainly.
Unnamed things were worse, and this one was going to be bad either way.
There was a wager.
Falkin had a bet running with another guard.
The prize… she was the prize.
Not matched. Not chosen. A condition to be satisfied.
Find a mate like Karuk’s, an Earth match, a real one, win the wager.
And the other guard has to come do the process too, and it’s binding, it’s honor, it’s two love stories, all because Falkin found the exact right—
The exact right what?
Not woman. Not person.
Match.
The exact right match to satisfy the terms.
She sat down on the edge of the chair, on the corner of her grandmother’s blanket.
Her perfectionism and her trust issues came up together, in perfect terrible sync, the way they always had.
The two of them were the only reliable partnership she’d ever managed.
Because this was the thing she’d been braced for her whole life, and she hated, she absolutely hated, being right.
This was why you kept the door shut.
This was why being useful was safe and being seen was not.
Being seen meant someone had a use for the seeing.
He’d known.
That was the part her mind kept skidding back to and away from, like a bad bearing.
He’d never mentioned the bet.
He’d stood in her lab and told her the tender true-sounding thing: you’re falling toward me and fighting it alone in the dark and I didn’t think that was fair.
And he’d left out the one fact that turned the whole speech inside out.
He hadn’t told her she was a match.
He’d told her she was the winning move.
The freight lane. The chair. The remembering.
All of it, all of it, and she’d let herself—for three days she’d let herself almost—
God. She’d almost.
She’d been standing at an open fridge with a rack she didn’t need, feeling the light come on, thinking someone came, thinking maybe this once the bright thing wouldn’t get—
She pressed the heel of her hand flat against her sternum, hard, and breathed, and did the thing she was best in the galaxy at doing.
She set it aside.
This was not a small fixable thing, but the feelings were.
She seated them and shimmed them and put them away. Because they were just feelings. And feelings came and went.
That was why she loved science. Science had function.
Feelings were just, well, feelings.
Pushing them away, because they didn’t matter, was how she survived.
By the time her breathing was even she had it back: the professional surface, the warm competent persona that she lived by up here on Libra Station.
She was fine.
She was going to be extremely fine.
She was, in fact, going to be nothing but professional, forever, starting immediately.
Her comm chimed while she was building the wall back.
Was it him?
For one lurching second, she thought so.
It wasn’t.
It was Danny.
An actual message.
the housing thing sorted out thanks sorry i forgot the time difference is it late? early?
She let it land, the one relationship in her life that had never once cost her more than it gave.
It steadied her.
Danny didn’t want anything from her. That was how she knew he loved her.
Everyone else had a use for her. Her mother had the fourth ring, the station had the person who knew the process, and now a blue-haired guard had a wager.
And she’d been so tired, so quietly bottomlessly tired, that for three days she’d almost let herself believe it.
That this once someone had come to take a corner of it because they wanted her to have it lighter.
The almost was the part she couldn’t forgive.
Herself, not him. For how badly she’d wanted it to be real.
She typed back to Danny:
Proud of you. Call when you can. Love you.
Watched it turn green, the one green confirmation in her life that didn’t mean she’d just paid for something.
Then she closed the door the rest of the way, and this time it held.
He knew the second she walked into the session.
She saw him know it.
The small shift, his hand drifting toward the cuff and stopping.
And she understood, with a fresh cold drop in her stomach, that of course he knew.
He always knew. He was built to know.
He’d been reading her weather this whole time like it was owed to him.
Had he felt the door slam from two decks away?
Probably.
Good.
Let him.
“Brooklyn,” he said, low, as the others filed in. Just her name, the way he said it, warm and unhurried and, she saw it now, practiced.
Everything about him was patient because patience was the strategy. Patience was how you won a long bet.
“Guard Falkin.” She set her untouched coffee at her elbow and pulled up the manifest.
She did not pick the coffee up, not once, all session.
She was not going to give him a single tell to count. “The delegation’s transport reservations are confirmed through the end of the collection cycle. I’ve flagged the two lanes that need re-tolerancing. Everything else is in the packet.”
A beat.
She felt him recalibrate, the way she’d once recalibrated a half-pace of distance in an empty room.
It gave her a mean flat satisfaction to be the one doing it now.
“Understood,” he said. Careful. “Thank you.”
“It’s the job.” She kept her eyes on the screen. “Was there anything else the delegation needs from station liaison? I want to make sure you have everything. Efficiently.”
She gave him back the word. On purpose.
And watched it land.
Watched him hear the thing under it, because he heard everything under everything. Watched him not chase it.
This time the not-pushing didn’t unsettle her at all.
Now she knew what it was.
Not respect.
Tactics.
A man didn’t push a mark he was certain of.
“Brooklyn,” he said again, quieter, with something in it that would have wrecked her three days ago, something that sounded exactly like the plain true hard thing with nothing in it, “whatever you heard—”
“I heard the reservations are confirmed.” She stood, gathering her tablet and her canvas bag and her heart rate, which was behaving perfectly, thank you. It was doing exactly what she’d trained it to do.
He watched her rise.
“I heard the lane’s working and the compound’s arriving intact and the talks are progressing.
That’s what I heard. That’s all I need to have heard.
” A small professional smile that gave away exactly nothing.
The one she’d built when she was nineteen and had never once let slip.
“I’ve got a collection window. The compound doesn’t wait. ”
“I know it doesn’t.”
He wasn’t looking at the manifest.
He was looking at her, all the way there, that lighthouse looking.
For the first time since she’d met him she was grateful for being able to shut people out. For every year she’d spent learning to build it.
Behind it she could feel the thing she wasn’t going to let out where he could catch it.
“Please. Two minutes. Not here. Let me—”
“There isn’t a second chance to do the samples right,” Brooklyn said, pleasant, even, the centrifuge voice with no crack in it anywhere, none, she’d checked. “There’s only the one. So I do it right the first time and I don’t do it twice.”
“Brooklyn,” he started.
She slung the bag onto her shoulder. “You said you weren’t asking me to decide anything, Falkin. So I’m not deciding anything. I’m just working. You can respect that, right? You’re good at respecting what I want.”
It was a cruel thing to say and she said it kindly, which was the cruelest way.
She watched it go in. She did not care.
She was not letting herself care.
Caring was a thing that could be spent and taken and wagered, apparently, so she was closing the account.
“Welcome to Libra Station,” she said, which made no sense.
He’d been here for nearly two weeks. Except it made perfect sense. It was the last thing she’d said to him in a corridor before all of this, and she was handing it back to reset them to strangers. “Someone will send you the schedule for tomorrow.”
She walked to the door.
She did not hurry. She did not slam anything.
She reached the lift bank and hit the call panel a little harder than necessary. One crack in the whole clean performance.
She’d allow herself that one.
She stepped in and turned around.
He was standing exactly where she’d left him. Hands loose at his sides.
Not pushing. Never pushing.
Watching her go with something on his face that she refused, absolutely refused, to name.
Naming it would mean feeling it.
And she had a collection window and a compound that didn’t wait and a brother in a room she’d paid for and a mother on a fourth ring.
None of them were a prize in anyone’s game.
And neither, it turned out, was she.
The doors started to close.
“Brooklyn,” he said, one more time, low. She heard everything he wasn’t allowed to say fast enough. She looked at the descending numbers instead of at him.
Nope, she thought, in the pleasant flat efficient voice she used for closing things.
She was very, very good at not thinking about things.
She was going to need every bit of it.